There’s one thing for sure – if you are in Jamaica you will hear some reggae. Not just a small riff here, or a sonnet there, but banging, deep base, reggae almost everywhere you go.
Now don’t get me wrong, I like reggae. My Marley credentials are fairly impressive (I saw Bob live Hammersmith Odeon) as are my Toots and the Maytals experiences (somewhere in London early eighties) and who can forget Desmond Dekker and the Aces? Even today the Jolly Boys carry on this fine tradition of good quality reggae.
It’s just that after a while you (I) need a respite. In Montego Bay I can recommend no better place than the peace and relative tranquillity of Cinnamon Hill Golf course which is an oasis of approximately 7,000 yards of lush, verdant green that offers diverse elevation changes.
At one part of the course you could be playing on a links course, but half an hour later you’re hitting from an elevated tee down to a very narrow fairway surrounded by heavy duty rainforest undergrowth. The level to which you enjoy the course is likely to be determined maybe on how much Appleton (rum) has been consumed the evening before, as it can either be golf hell or golf heaven.
As the game gets underway the music does come back to you. Standing on the first tee, 574 yard par 5 from the back tees, all I could think was ‘get up stand up hit it to the right, get up stand up don’t give up the slice’ which did not help. After this the course winds back to the club house and a monstrous par 3 with a 170 yard carry across water.
It’s time to nip in to the bar and get a (soft) drink and then down to the ocean. The fifth is a truly good hole a 435 yard par 4 dog leg left with the ocean just beyond the green. I was, however, waiting in vain for a good drive so onto the next. The eighth and ninth are fairly plain up and down straight and narrow but then back up the hill to the tenth where the truly spectacular starts.
Cinnamon Hill’s 5th
With thoughts of last night’s drinking well behind me, I was jamming and the eleventh hole satisfies anybody’s desire for special playing conditions.On the 17th you are 350 feet above sea level and no matter how strong the wind, you can feel it in your face and it’s daunting but exciting. Now we are down the eighteenth and I lead an exodus for the bar and something harder than Ting.
Cinnamon Hill is worth a visit and if you thought the music links were exaggerated the course backs on to the house of Johnny Cash plus the Director of Golf Robert Ames is married to a cousin of …yes you guessed it…Bob Marley. One Love, One Heart let’s get together and feel all right ..it’s Jamaica!
By Graham McKenzie
